Month: October 2022

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Margaret Munns, 1922 – 2022

Madame Munns, 1988 school yearbook

I learned this week of the death of Margaret Munns, my French teacher for all four years of high school. Madame Munns lived to the age of 100, and was already 66 when I graduated in 1988. I gather she retired shortly after that. She was an outstanding teacher and I was very fortunate to have learned from her for so long. I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for giving me the foundations for what has become a great source of pleasure to me for many years.

Madame Munns was traditional in her teaching. We students sat in rows of desks facing forward, occasionally turning to our left or right for conversations with other students. I believe her class room was all French all the time, at least at the upper levels. I don’t recall what grammar textbooks we used, but there were daily exercises for homework and chalk-talk lectures to review sticky points. There were weekly vocabulary words to learn as well as irregular verb conjugations to memorize. We had frequent quizzes and tests to study for; we seldom went to the school’s “language lab”, which was little more than a collection of two dozen tape recorders.

But alongside the dryer stuff, we worked with real French texts. We read the 1840 novel Colomba by Prosper Mérimée, which featured rough Corsicans and introduced me to the history of Bonaparte’s Hundred Days return from exile. We read the 1923 play Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine by Jules Romains. I delighted in Dr Knock’s shyster conman bit even as I was totally lost by the extended Act I description of Dr Parpalaid’s fancy automobile. We read Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger in French class a full year before we were assigned to read it in translation in English class. I didn’t understand the notion of existential epiphany in either language. We read En attendant Godot, whose symbolism I understood better, but whose Russian-named characters I couldn’t keep straight. (We also read Émile et les détectives, which I only later learned was a translation from the German).

Madame Munns did not present as a “warm fuzzy” to her students in my era (though perhaps I wasn’t the most attuned observer of emotional communication), but I have three memories that make it clear she was looking out for me personally. I was a strong student in 9th grade, and so was surprised when some scheduling error caused me to be assigned to Madame Munns’s less-advanced French class in 10th grade. I discussed this with her on the first day of class. She agreed that it was an error that we would get fixed, but that in the meantime I should join the class until it got sorted out.

I listened as she started the first day’s lesson with a review of some basics: colors, days of the week, classroom objects. I confess I was feeling rather superior to these duffers who couldn’t remember cahier or crayon, and I imagine my face showed it when she called on one student to come up to the front of the class to count aloud from one to ten. When the boy had finished, she asked if anyone could count the next ten numbers. My hand shot up, and I strutted to the front, eager to show that I was clearly in the wrong class. No sooner had I started than I realized that after a summer off I couldn’t recall what came after «Onze, douze, treize, … ». «… quarante ?» I ventured. Madame Munns frowned. «Dix-quatre?». Eventually she supplied me the missing «quatorze» and I made it up to vingt without further incident.

Madame Munns didn’t say anything particular that I recall, but I distinctly remember a look she gave me which I interpreted as “Honors class or non-Honors class, I still have things to teach young man”. Did she know that those pesky numbers in the teens range are hard to navigate, and easy to forget over a break? Did she pick me for that item to make a point? I’ll never know, but the incident took me down a peg and stayed with me when my schedule was corrected a few days later.

The second episode I recall came just a few weeks later. Madame Munns had arranged for her AP students, seniors all, to subscribe to a French pedagogical newspaper aimed at an American high school audience. The paper came out weekly and was delivered in bulk to French teachers around the country. I was still in 10th grade, two years off from AP French, but Madame Munns took me aside and asked me if I’d like to subscribe as well. I did, and for the next two years I would stop by her desk once a week at the end of class and quietly pick up my personal copy of the paper. I believe I was on the only non-AP student who did this. I would read it over the course of the week, in class after I had finished a desk assignment, in a free period, at home, whenever. I read basic stories of French politics and culture, stories about happenings in the major cities of France, and news of the wider Francophone world. Even with the language and content tailored for teenagers, this was hard going for me. But I drew a lot of confidence from the fact that Madame Munns had picked me out as a student who was ready for this challenge, and I stuck with it as a weekly habit for three years.

Yours truly in 1988.

The third memory I have of personalized education from Madame Munns took place over several weeks of senior year. It wasn’t part of the AP French curriculum, but somehow I ended up reading Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendahl. I don’t recall our school library having a lot of other French language books, but surprisingly this one was on the shelf, unabridged, in the original French. I read a few chapters each week and buffered up questions to ask Madame Munns about parts I didn’t understand. We met informally once or twice a month and she explained to me the things I was missing, both idiomatic expressions and cultural background. This was well before the World Wide Web of course, so the personal attention was invaluable.

I never spoke to Madame Munns again after graduation. I don’t know why, really, it just didn’t seem like a thing one could do. I was in a hurry to get out of town and put Worcester behind me, and my high school teachers were part of Worcester. I know I felt proud when I learned over the summer, post-graduation, that I’d gotten a top score on my French AP exam, and prouder still of the reaction I got four years later from a French cabbie on my first visit to Paris. I chatted with the driver during a ride, and at some point he asked me what part of Canada I was from. He then absolutely refused to believe I was from America – no Americans spoke French that fluently. I thought of sharing experiences of that first trip with Madame Munns when I got home, but she had retired by then and tracking down former teachers just wasn’t in my lexicon.

I wish I had thought to reconnect with her at some point in these past 10 years of my renewed interested in French studies. Her family says that Madame Munns was intellectually engaged and active right through her 100 years, and I read in her obituary that she did in fact keep up with a number of her former students. I would have enjoyed comparing stories of French travels with her and perhaps doing French crossword puzzles together. As it is, I can only write this posthumous remembrance of her and share it with the world.

Madame Munns inscribed my yearbook with the dedication «David, tu me manqueras. Meilleurs voeux, M. Munns». Even though I have not been in contact with her for the past 34 years, elle me manque aussi. Merci mille fois, Madame Munns.

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Odds and Ends

I’ve read / watched to a lot of excellent English language books / movies / television. I’ve also consumed a lot of ordinary stuff, and more than my fair share of absolute junk: insipid novels, low-brow sitcoms, cringeworthy comic books or comic-book movies. In French, though, I’ve mostly read things recommended to me by someone, and that’s mostly good stuff. The past couple weeks, though, I’ve strayed from the recommendations path a bit, with the predictable result that the stuff I’ve consumed has … a range of quality. But it’s all part of expanding my cultural literacy, so it’s all good.

Le viandier de Polpette: L’ail des ours

Le viandier de Polpette is a quirky but charming volume of bandes desinées by Julien Neel and Olivier Milhaud. I picked it off the shelf of the French Library completely at random. It features Polpette, a former army cook who now runs the kitchen for the adult son of a nobleman in their mountain redoubt, Le Coq Vert. The book interleaves lovingly presented country French recipes with a vague plot about the Count’s father coming to visit. There’s a lot of running gags among the other denizens of the Coq Vert, including a retired British colonel and a stereotypical French proletariat. And there’s also a firebrand of a young woman who walks around with an entourage of unleashed pet ferrets. Oh, somewhere in there we encounter the rather large titular animal who may or may not be a bear, and who seems to have no relationship to garlic. The overall effect is off-beat, shall we say.

I did pick up a number of vocabulary words from this book:

  • capiteux – se dit d’un vin, d’un alcool qui monte à la tête, d’un parfum très fort.
  • la minerai – roche présentant une concentration élevée minéraux utiles (si inutiles, on l’appelle la gangue).
  • châtelain – propriétaire d’un château.
  • chaland (vieux) – celui qui achète habituellement chez un même marchand.
  • gargote (f) – restaurant où l’on mange à bas prix une mauvaise nourriture.
  • amenuiser – rendre quelque chose plus fiable, moins important. réduire, diminuer. Cf la menuiserie, «amenuiser une planche».
  • la guigne – (familier) malchance persistante; déveine, poisse. Avoir de la guigne.
  • ça barde – (populare) cela devient dangereux, en parlant d’une action; cela devient violent, en parlant d’une discussion.
  • être givré – (familier) être fou.
  • couver – entourer quelqu’un de soins attentifs et excessifs de tendresse.
  • d’ores et déjà – dès maintenant.
  • jaja – (populaire) vin rouge.
  • toupet – (familier) audace, effronterie. «Quel toupet !»
  • un encas – repas léger préparé pour être servi en cas de besoin.
  • un fantassin – militaire de l’infanterie.

Balle Perdue

The movie Balle Perdue (2020) is available on Netflix, and is in French, so I watched it. I haven’t seen any films from the Fast and Furious franchise, but I imagine they are similar. There’s a great deal of high speed car chases, various souped up vehicles with enhancements like hardened front grills, turbo thrusters, and sharpened forklift attachments. Inevitably, most of the cars crash, with the exception of our hero’s. It endures one non-fatal collision after another, yet somehow not only keeps functioning, it magically appears without dents or scapes just seconds later during the same chase. Not a great job of film editing. There’s also a lot of shooting, as there’s a lot of (corrupt) police officers involved. The plot, such as it is, involves a brilliant but wayward young car mechanic who enhances cars for a criminal gang, gets arrested and sent to jail, but is then paroled under the sponsorship of a police captain who wants his own fleet of enhanced police cruisers to catch the bad guys.

This works out great, until the police captain figures out too many bad guys are still getting away, and starts to suspect a leak in his department. Naturally, this being a French police movie, large parts of the brigade are corrupt and in the pay of the drug gangs. The police captain is murdered by his lieutenant, who then pins the crime on the wunder-mechanic, who flees and then has to clear his name and expose the corruption. This gives the film an excuse for lots of gun battles and dead bodies in addition to the high-speed car chases.

Not a lot of vocabulary here, but always good to hear rough accents and street language.

Skidamarink

Guillaume Musso is one of the best-selling French authors of the 21st century. He’s written over twenty books, primarily mysteries and thrillers, and sells more than a million copies a year. His first novel, entitled Skidamarink, appeared in 2001 and made very little impression. It sold a few thousand copies and got tepid reviews before going out of print. But it was re-published in 2020 with a new forward by the author, and was subsequently recorded as an audio-book. This is how I came to listen to it — I browsed Audible.com for French mysteries, saw this as a recent publication, looked up the author and found he was widely celebrated in French popular literature and clicked “buy”. Only when I listened to the forward did I learn that it was Musso’s first book and not a recent one.

The forward also had an interesting bit about the book’s place in the Musso canon. Apparently, Musso doesn’t think much of it: it was a first novel, he wrote it while he was teaching school, his editor for the book was his mother. But when his later works became popular, fans went looking for this early work. Prices for used copies skyrocketed on auction sites, and low-quality pirated scans circulated on the web. Musso writes that he held off from republishing the work because he thought he’d revise it first, but then kept prioritizing new works. So in 2020, he finally greenlighted the re-issuance of the book with its original text. In the forward, he notes “the faults in its quality, but also the quality of its faults.” He also notes the similarities with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but points out that his book was published two years before Brown’s blockbuster.

Skidamarink book isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty shoddy. The mystery is shoddy somebody stole the Mona Lisa painting, cut it into pieces, and sent them to four seemingly unconnected people. The thief also sent literary quotes from Victor Hugo, John Dunne, and the like and summoned the four civilians to a secret meeting in an Italian church. Subsequent events convince the four that their lives are in danger if they don’t work together to decipher a series of cryptic criminal threats that the thief issues through the media, like murdering prominent business leaders and poisoning gated communities. The whole thing is a bit too rococo and (as Musso writes in the forward) romanesque for my tastes.

But the audio book is in French, which is really all it promised to be. Listening is a bit of a challenge, not because of the clichéd expressions, but because of the narrators unfamiliar accents, especially as he tries to differentiate three Americain characters and one Italian.

Glenn, naissance d’un prodige

Glenn Gould was a Canadian classical pianist who lived from 1932 to 1982, dying of a stroke at the age of 50. His 1956 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time. He had an unusual style, crouching over the keyboard as he played and humming audibly to himself. After a short concertizing career as a young artist, he retreated to the studio where he made dozens of recordings right up to his death. He was a pop icon and a bit eccentric, but recorded interviews make it clear he was quite intelligent and could speak affably about his life and his music without difficulty.

I point this out because Ivan Calbérac’s play Glenn, naissance d’un prodige, paints the title character as far more eccentric, to the point of being paranoid and incoherent. Perhaps Gould was that way in private or in down periods, but there’s enough public footage and interview recordings of him being fairly normal that the play’s presentation rings hollow. The script is otherwise undistinguished, presenting a sequence of biographical sketches that offer little beyond the biography section of his Wikipedia page. There’s a homey portrayal of Glenn’s father, and a depiction of Glenn’s mother as both narcissistic and obsessive, but given the distorted presentation of Gould himself I put little stock in these as accurate characterizations of his parents.

But the play was featured in the September 2022 issue of L’avant-scène théâtre, so I read it. I noted several unfamiliar vocabulary words as I went, which are always valuable to me:

  • un brochet: poisson ésocidé des eaux douces [pike en anglais].
  • écueil (m): (litéraire) tout ce qui fait obstacle, met en péril; danger, piège. Litéralement, une tête de roche couverte par moins de 20 m d’eau.
  • espiègle: personne vive; malicieuse mais sans méchanceté. De Till Eulenspiegel. espièglerie.
  • voilage (m): Grand rideau de fenêtre en voile.
  • limace (f): mollusque pulmoné terrestre sans coquille externe [slug en anglais].
  • décoifant: surprenant; dérangeant les cheveux de quelqu’un.
  • dithyrambique: très élogieux, d’un enthousiasme emphatique, outré. Dithyrambe – cantique consacré à Dionysus.
  • clavecin (m): instrument de musique à cordes pincées et à clavier.
  • parti pris: opinion audacieux; idée fixe a priori.
  • fêlure (f): fracture incomplète d’un os.
  • luxation (f): déplacement des 2 extrémités osseuses d’une articulation.
  • convier: inviter
  • accaparer: occuper exclusivement quelqu’un, lui prendre tout son temps; absorber.
  • larguer: abandonner quelqu’un, quelque chose; s’en débarrasser.
  • foutoir (m): (populaire) endroit où règne un désordre extrême.
  • fiston (m): mot d’affection adressé à son fils ou à un jeune garçon [kiddo en anglais].

Other than that, I’ve been doing French crosswords and collecting vocabulary words from children’s books. But this post is long enough, so I’ll write about that in an upcoming article.